If we want our companies to grow, we need to shift our marketing mindset beyond the quick, easy marketing tactics. If your day is anything like mine, you see the same pitches every time you log into your email and LinkedIn account: social media and marketing gurus promoting their latest secret solutions to email marketing, CRM systems, lead generation, or web design. These pitches inevitably include stacks of case studies and grand promises of how quickly I’ll see results and start growing my business at record pace.
These messages may seem too good to be true, but these sales teams continue sending them day after day because they work. At our very core, we all want these promises to be true. Many people soon invest in these magic bullets, either out of misplaced optimism, inexperience, or a desperate need for a new sales tactic.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, many of us have fallen into these traps. Even worse, some of us are still making the same mistake, even if we don’t realize it.
Convincing clients
When we talk to clients about their managed services, they may not see the need for additional trainings, secondary backups, or layered security. Instead, there may only be a few services they are truly interested in. But you know better than anyone that a business today cannot afford to not protect itself from the cybercriminals lurking around every corner.
Clients need to make the important decisions today to protect themselves in the future. Technology, and the services that come with it, is a long-term investment.
Although we realize the importance of thinking long-term, we often fail to do so within our own businesses, especially when it comes to marketing. This short-term focus will disrupt our business at every turn. When we’re first building up our businesses, the small wins at the beginning generate big returns.
But if our strategy does not evolve as our business matures, and we start pursuing higher-value prospects, the opportunities for new clients become harder to find. These same prospects also take more work to capture and their sales cycles are longer.
The ideal MSP marketing mindset
The MSPs who enjoy exponential growth all have a similar marketing mindset. This includes:
- A long-term, methodical vision for growth. They have a detailed roadmap that includes the milestones they need to cross to reach their goals.
- A willingness to invest in that long-term potential. If they are not willing to pour money into the proper marketing strategies, they’ll never see growth.
- The endurance to stick with the plan through thick and thin. Marketing is a series of tests. If a business enters a down period, it grows tempting to pull back on some of the marketing efforts. Resist this temptation.
- The understanding that their success will require an uncommon effort. Marketing for long-term growth is a marathon, not a sprint. To generate consistent results year over year, the marketing team will need to meet and strategic regularly.
You won’t find these MSPs waiting for referrals to ring their phones. Instead, these businesses push into new markets and jump in front of new opportunities.
Because of this, they gradually grow larger and larger and are recognized as industry thought leaders. Instead of sitting in the audience at the next industry conference, they are talking on stage in front of their peers.
When you work on your own marketing strategy around the clock, you can expand into new markets and capture audiences you never had access to before. By pushing beyond your typical referral crowd, you can close sales with businesses that will introduce you to a new demographic of referral-based business.
Photo: Cat Act Art / Shutterstock.
